France is lagging Germany, Italy and the UK in the race to produce medicines, which is detrimental to patient health, according to a report by Entreprises du médicament en France (Leem), published on Tuesday.
Leem has created the first Observatory of access to medicines and the attractiveness of France for the pharma industry. The first results reveal that France is falling behind other European countries in producing new medicines, particularly in originator biologics, generics and biosimilars.
“Excluding critical situations, German, English, and Italian patients benefit from medicines several months ahead of French patients,” Leem wrote in the report.
Of the new drugs granted marketing authorisation between 2017 and 2022, only 48 were produced in France, compared with 122 in Germany, according to the figures.
“The availability of new medicines in France is significantly lower than in Germany, Italy or the UK, partly due to longer negotiation times and unfavourable economic conditions,” the report reads.
By the end of 2022, 34% of medicines granted marketing authorisation at the European level between 2018 and 2021 were unavailable in France.
The decline of the pharmaceutical industry in France is nothing new: since 2013, Hexagon has fallen from first to fifth place among European drug producers.
“Overall, France is exporting less and less of the mature medicines it produces and importing more and more of the innovative products it does not produce sufficiently,” the report reads.
In June 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the allocation of €7 billion in healthcare to make France the first innovative and sovereign European nation in healthcare. Among the priority sectors are biomedical research, relocating healthcare industries within the country, and innovation.
At the start of June, the president announced that the production of 50 drugs would be relocated to France, with production for half of them set to begin in the next few weeks.
But, according to Thierry Hulot, President of Leem, “there is a ‘drugs emergency’ if we want to make France the 1st European nation in terms of innovation and sovereignty in healthcare, in line with the wishes of the President of the Republic”.
(Clara Bauer-Babef | EURACTIV.fr)
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